Islands in the Sky

Good teenage story by Clarke. Absolutely filled with technical details as if the author had interviewed experienced astronauts. This was not possible in 1954 but a good scientist can make educated guesses. As a teen I would have given this 4 stars. As an adult it is mostly predictable and so it gets three.

It is fun to read early science fiction. At least stories written in the late '50's and early '60's. They are so innocent. This book tells the story of a young man who wins a trip to stay at a space station for a couple of weeks. It is set a hundred or so years in the future. Space travel is a regular thing. Space stations are large and inhabited - regularly used. So much is fantasy in today's world, but that makes it more fun!
The only thing that is really off-putting is the lack of women in the story! No girls at the space station school. No girls in positions as navigators, or pilots, or engineers. But that's ok. We know when it was written and attitudes of the time.
I like reading science fiction like this. Optimistic and joyful.
OH! show more and at the end of the book, when the young man meets a family from Mars, there s reference to discoveries made in Clarke's book The Sands of Mars. That was fun! show less

hen George Lucas was filming the first Star Wars film, and the government authorities had to take a look at the plans for the X-Wing fighter to determine whether government secrets had been leaked out, they missed the boat by about 30 years. Science fiction writers had been guessing the state of things for ages, and it's truly a remarkable experience to see just how right they were. I just read the late Arthur C. Clarke's Islands in the Sky, and was fascinated with the intricate descriptions of the Space Shuttle, weather satellites, communication devices, ideas of orbiting solar energy panels, space stations..etc... all written in 1952! Simply amazing. How one man could think of the entire world so far ahead, and then live long enough show more to see it come to fruition. And we did go to Venus (although not a manned outfit) by 1985, but found it incredibly hot and uninviting. So the time frame was off a little, but the ideas were sound.

Another aspect was how similar this book is to Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. I know this comparison has been made before, some even suggesting that OSC copied it from Clarke (which is not true at all, but instead points to how amazingly accurate Clarke was when developing the science behind the novel). It is a homage to Clarke for Card to be so directly compared with him. The orbiting space "hotel", with it's rotating gravity wells, is almost identical to the military training station in Ender's Game. Also the ideas about where "down" was in space. There is room enough in this world for both novels.

One day, when the fascination for things of fantasy fade, when dragons are asleep on their hoards, and vampires are safely stored in their coffins, and wizards study the stars rather than alchemy, the jewels of science fiction will come back to enchant children once again. Islands in the Sky is currently out of print, and I only hope that one day that return to join the classics of the age, never to go out of print again. In fact, there are quite a few novels now that teenagers and kids can read from the masters of science fiction. They are valuable resources for teachers who want to incorporate science and math into reading. I'm gonna list some of them here, and will work on it more as a resource for teachers that come to Borders.

Have Space Suit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein

Red Planet also by Heinlein

Dolphin Island by Clarke

And every student should be exposed to the short story "Cold Equations," by Tom Godwin. Not to mention stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. show less

This is one of Clarke's earliest and among his few young adult novels The book is centered upon Roy Malcolm, a teen who wins a trip to the Inner Space Station through a game show. That reminds me a bit of the set up of Heinlein's juvenile, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, but while that story is an adventure, this is more a space travelogue for a young reader interested in what it would be like to travel into space--and published in 1952, as you can imagine, a lot of the scientific details are very dated. It is interesting to see how prescient Clarke was, writing five years before Sputnick, but because there's not much story to it, I think it doesn't hold up as well as Heinlein's juveniles. Nor would I recommend this as an introduction to show more Clarke. Better choices would be A Fall of Moondust, Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, 2001: A Space Odyssey (film or novel) or a collection of his short stories. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2699804.html

good wholesome stuff, with boys becoming men in space: our protagonist gets to stay in the big low-orbit space station, where the entire crew appear to be English and male, and experience a few other adventures but also learn some important lessons about life and about engineering (though nothing much about other matters, the only women in space being an actor making a movie in orbit and the members of a friendly family of Mars colonists). The most striking difference for me between Clarke's 1952 future and what has actually happened is that the cost of space flight has proven to be so high that economies of scale have pushed us much more to unmanned spacecraft and also to international show more collaboration than he anticipated, though I am sure he approved of both developments. show less

Though this is supposedly a 'juvennile novel', aimed at '11 and over' its not childish in its writing, and although a lot of the facts are now out of date (it was written in the early '50s and set in 2054!) there's a lot of stuff in here thats still very relevant!
Fabulous!

Here's where the aauthor suffers from the passage of time. Rather, the story suffers. Writtenin 1952, this was paue science fiction, taking place in the year 2052. Well, here it is 2009 and most of what he wrote has come true. I believe by 2052 there will be two or more space stations and residents on the moon and possibly Mars. we have poohpoohed Venus and Mercury as uninhabitable, and the so-called life on Mercury in the book herfe isn't science so much as fantasy. If the book came out in 1952 and I reviewed it then, it would earn 4 plus stars, but it's lost a full point because today it is rather boring. face it: we read these kind of storiesz because we don't want to face what is real. sSpeaking for myself, literature is a drug for show more me, and i am an addict. So when i take a dose of myh addiction, i want it to be exciting and take me where the authorl was. This (I thinK) IS THE REASON classics are made and why people who think as I do (you know, the intelligentsia or lfellow genii) read the same books i do. hehe.. show less